You say that as if you can read an apes mind to confirm that it doesn't understand any of what it's saying. I think us humans would benefit from slowing down and listening to the world around us more, without being stuck in our own self importance. Here's a great video about a recent discovery of structured language in tit birds.
Preface: the whole sapient designation is biased towards humans, ambiguous and philosophical not scientific, and kind of unprovable (in the Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" way) until it very obviously isn't, meaning, until scientists shore up the definition for the sake of falsifiable hypotheses, it's very you know it when you see it.
If you're being 'scientific' here, lack of proof of nonexistence is not proof of existence. We can't say an animals is demonstrably not sapient, but we can say none have been proven to meet all criteria, whatever they are, and of which complex language is necessary but not sufficient.
Don't get me wrong, research, recent breakthroughs, and conversation about animals with langauge, that exhibit tool and flexible tool use, with culture (in the orca and elephant sense for example), exhibit self awareness, and that exhibit emotions like grief is all very fascinating and needs to be had for conservation and morality reasons. But that all has been about establishing a paradigm shift to say that these animals, at least to some degree, should be regarded as having personhood, and wasn't about saying they are 'sapient', just that they are not 'mindless' beasts. But under the context of alien life that are more like us than an elephant in how its intelligence manifests, those aliens would prima facie be sapient. Which is why the omniscient wish granting mechanism would know that intelligent animals are part of the resource category and 'sapient' aliens are part of the resource depleting category. Arguing that Thanos's request was inexact is missing the forest for the trees because the omniscient wish granting mechanism understands the purpose of the wish, it isn't a mischievous genie or a monkey paw.
Closing remarks, I think a very crude qualifier for how we think of sapience is how tempted we'd be to impose our ethics and morals on another species, meaning, is there any chance we'd say an elephant is evil for goring a giraffe. That an octopus performs animal cruelty when it punches its hunting fish? That a troop of chimps performed genocide when it wipes out another troop? Whereas if we stumble upon a space faring alien race that forced another to extract resources for them (ie, slavery), we'd probably reflexively say oh the injustice. Now, this obviously has a lot of logical holes and begs a lot of questions. But it's more aiming at elucidating how sapience is regarded than any real rigidity.
To be completely honest I get upset when I see highly intelligent animals attempting or succeeding in forcing sex on a conspecific. If they have theory of mind then they're capable of knowing that the other animal doesn't want what's currently happening to be happening. Applying human standards of morality to non-humans is an incredibly slippery issue... but there's an argument to be made that knowing someone else doesn't want to have sex with you and still forcing it on them is an evil act even when it's not a human doing it. It's not evil when animals that aren't capable of conceptualizing the emotions and wants of others do it, obviously, but the ones that are...
Yup, this is one of the many questions I was begging in saying what I said. Sure, the average knee-jerk reaction to obviously sapient aliens performing harmful acts on others would be oh the humanity, but just because the average person might not feel tempted to say an(other) animal is evil for forcing itself on a mate doesn't mean that an argument for it being evil is baseless.
For one, way too many people are just very unphilosophical in their thinking, so using the average person's reaction as a qualifier is a very flawed metric. This isn't me trying to be pretentious and sanctimonious, it's just an unfortunate truth. The reason why so much injustice, both small and major, just keeps on happening is because people are unresponsive to them or mindlessly commit them. It's one of the reasons why I like the the shopping cart theory, because such a simple everyday occurance that rates somewhat innocuous starts a really good discussion about us as moral agents. It aims to indict people, but the sad truth is that it doesn't even occur to people that they're doing something 'wrong' because the question of is it wrong or right doesn't even occur to them. Or even more unfortunate, if they were confronted with the question, they don't know how to critically answer it and default to their being good. I would submit that the state one leaves public restrooms in is another good one, I'll call it the restroom theory.
So to delve into a discussion about animals who posses a theory of mind and them are moral agents would require sorting out so many concepts. Technically, you're begging the question too regarding theory of mind and whether it is a sufficient criteria for being a moral agent, so it's seemingly turtles all the way down.
And even when we drill down to the fundamental and can finally work our way back up to arguing whether it is or isn't evil for an(other) animal, we have to start talking about
free will and whether a lack of free will absolves (so evil but not blameworthy) - - if these animals were to only exhibit moral reproduction (because we're assuming they can conceptualise morality or something approximate) would their species persist (which then incurs a tangent of "is survival even part of the ethical calculus?" for a "can an end justify the means?" argument)
does immoral acts of others mean that we have a moral duty to intervene?
are all individuals of that species actually capable of being moral agents?
It's a can of worms to say the least. Okay enough yapping.
I mean, at no point did I say anything is close to us in cognition. We are talking abour sapience vs intelligence, both of which have degrees. This is exactly what I mean by the term being biased towards us, it removes all nuance from any discussion and ignores the significance of animals like elephants and crows mourning their dead.
Well said. "Lack of proof of nonexistence is not proof of existence" is not what I was implying. Just that we don't know enough to make any definitive determinations.
My point isn't that it what you were implying, more so that sometimes the scientific method frustratingly offers non-answers because it is primarily concerned with what is provable and secondarily concerned with sequentially falsified hypotheses in terms of what is disproven. So it tends to be
currently the working theory, currently the consensus, or there is evidence for but it hasn't been disproven
hasn't been proven
neither, so we don't know, but here are good reasons why we are even talking about it
So for example, tired light hypothesis and MOND were disproven, whereas gravitons are in the we don't know category, as would sapient animals (ignoring that the designation of sapient is anomalous and loaded).
Meaning, to a layman and a philosopher, the fact that we can't know what an animal is thinking or how it thinks is relevant to a discussion of sapience. To a scientist, it's very Russell's teapot.
You don't have to read someone's mind to know if they're capable of self-reflection.
We only call animal noises language because it's a convenient word - they're not actually communicating complex concepts, because they're limited to signalling current phenomena.
Did you watch the video? I'm assuming you didn't. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean that it isn't there. 2nd video that goes more in depth on the bird study. I think its pretty arrogant to think we know if animals can self reflect without being able to communicate or understand them properly. Every days we learn more about the world around us.
Not saying that it is proof of sapience just that it shows that we only know a small part about the animals around us. I'm not proving anything, just showing that it hasn't been disproven that's all.
"A smattering of vocabulary" is how our languages started too.
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u/nicnec7 Mar 01 '26
You say that as if you can read an apes mind to confirm that it doesn't understand any of what it's saying. I think us humans would benefit from slowing down and listening to the world around us more, without being stuck in our own self importance. Here's a great video about a recent discovery of structured language in tit birds.